Leontyne (24 page)

He pointed, somewhat mournfully, at a huge heap of smoking debris that a bulldozer was pushing together. I went to inquire where our car might be and found a policeman who said that they had towed away a couple of wrecks to the police pound at the back of the police station. When I went round there, I found that the car was a complete wreck,
and quite happily signed the papers for its official burial by the appropriate department.

Regensburg was a town that I found myself really at home in. Down on the quayside by the rushing Danube stream, there was a sausage kitchen, run by a lady who had been cooking her sausages there since the last year of World War One. This meant she had been turning over bangers on her griddle for seventy years and remarkably fine she looked on it. I soon discovered there was a kind of sausage dynasty in Regensburg, for her niece – and incidentally her heir – had married an ex-heavy-lorry salesman who had brilliantly expanded the sausage empire into a chain of shops and regular restaurants. The delicious sausages that had become so famous were made, apparently, solely from shin of pork, and for true perfection should be eaten with some of the eighty tons of sauerkraut the enterprise produced every year. One night when the sausage czar was in his cups, he hinted that there had been rumours that the fire which had burnt down the salt house had been started deliberately. After five hundred years of standing in the same place and burning down on the night we arrived, I think he probably had a point.

In the town hall, the guidebook told me that they had the last original torture chamber in Germany here in this odd and enduring town. They had called it a ‘questioning room' when it had been in full swing some centuries before. If you were accused you were questioned with the help of a number of devilish devices for stretching your arms or cracking your spine. If, under pressure, you confessed, you were dragged before a people's court where you had a chance to deny the charges, but the catch was that if you did that, the whole process started all over again. This happened three times in all and if you were still alive at the end of it and still denied the charges, you were allowed to go free.

The town is rich because it has a number of high-tech industries that have moved to the area, such as Siemens and BMW – the latter has one of the most modern car plants in
Europe. Ray was an enthusiast for BMWs so we went out to have a guided tour of the plant kindly arranged by the sausage czar. The guide who showed us round this glistening plant kept saying that only two years before the meadows where this factory had been built had been full of sheep. I felt the sheep probably had hornrimmed glasses and read the
Financial Times
in the German edition. The plant is run on the modern system whereby everything that it does not produce itself comes in from local factories at the very last minute – and these factories' output is controlled by the computer at the main plant. I was curious to know what would happen if there was a strike in one of the subsidiary plants and I was assured that there were no strikes in Germany, at least not here.

We walked from one huge shed to the next and watched fascinated as these symbols of modern life were rapidly assembled in a myriad shapes and colours. It is possible to order one of about three hundred different types of wing mirror, or so it seemed. When I mischievously tried to put one of the robots off its singular course by walking very closely in front of its guidance sensors as it transported a fully finished car to the inspection bay, I was briskly told not to provoke it as if it were a sleeping dog! As I walked out of the last stage of this dream factory, it occurred to me that these people were making the dreams that the old studios in Hollywood used to supply with the great films of the thirties and forties.

Far away, on the hills on the other side of the Danube from the factory, stood glistening in the sun the Temple of Valhalla, Ludwig's tribute to the minds of the great men that had made Germany famous a century before. This great Grecian classical structure stood on the top of a small hill overlooking the river. The Germans have resisted spoiling its natural outline by refusing to place railings round the gigantic stone stages, in spite of the protests from the relatives of the Japanese tourists, who, while taking snaps of the magnificent
columns, had taken that one step further back than they should have done and plunged thirty feet to the next level of unpardoning granite.

As I walked back to the boat that evening, I mused on the Germany I was discovering. The technical pursuit of perfection was obvious at every turn. The BMW plant made what everyone has come to believe is a very superior car, but will it be remembered in five hundred years' time? The Temple of Valhalla with its marble busts of Beethoven and Schiller seemed to me to reflect virtues more durable than any technical achievement. As I walked past the docks, I saw the shaded red lights of the Palais d'Amour which was clearly part of the same chain as the ones in Frankfurt, with its neat window boxes full of red geraniums, and a discreet pornographic video flickering half-hidden in the doorway to welcome the punter as he mounts the steps for his ration of heaven or, in this case,
Himmel
. I remembered at the tender age of thirteen lying in bed at my boarding school listening to my dormitory prefect reading a chapter from Smollett which ended, ‘And so, dear reader, I shall not burden you with the mystery of hymen.' I burned to be burdened and when I was, finally, I found out it was a great deal more mysterious than I had ever imagined.

Ray and I took the
Leo
for a day out up the Danube without the barge, travelling as far as the gorges at Kelheim and past the place where the new Rhine-Main-Donau Canal will join the Danube. The gorges are very impressive and I watched a climber scale the vertical cliffs above the raging river as we plugged away to reach the top of the gorge. We picnicked and chatted about our adventures so far and fell to wondering what our new pilot, Captain Frolich, was going to be like. Because of the great distances that we would inevitably travel due to the speed of the river, the new pilot would have to come prepared to stay on board at night because there was very little chance of him being in a position where he could take the train home at night. So it was with some trepidation
that we returned down the rushing Danube to Regensburg. It was on that trip that I calculated that the
Leo
travelled faster than she had ever done before (if you do not count the motorway), at the dizzying speed of 22 kilometres per hour.

I had decided that as we were now going off into the real distance we should have a short-wave radio so that we could call London, or rather, Portishead Radio, direct. While it had been possible to get to a telephone without too much difficulty thus far on our journey, the great distances between towns and the remoteness of some of the reaches of the Danube made a short-wave radio advisable. The two young men who came to fix it were extremely efficient and did the job quickly without any fuss. The curious thing about it was that although they were able to do all the tests and get it functioning, they did not know how to call anyone up because a licence was needed for that. I had a licence but I had to spend some hours reading the instructions in German before I heard the welcoming voice at the other end at Portishead Radio asking my ship's name (Lima-Echo-Oscar-November-Tango-Yankee-November-Echo) with a pronounced West Country burr.

Regensburg has been a crossroads for travellers for centuries because the bridge used to be the only one across the Danube for miles on either side. Tucked away in a little back street was a Czech bookseller who, on hearing my British accent, told me his life story, which should have been on the shelves with the fiction. He had been in the diplomatic service at the beginning of the war and then had joined the British special forces and had been dropped into France, where he seems to have spent the war. He was returned to England and soon after decided to go back to Czechoslovakia to see his family. At Calais he was kidnapped by the Czech secret service and returned home under arrest where he was sentenced to twelve years' hard labour in a quarry. After two years of this he escaped and returned to Germany where he lived in a refugee camp for ten years. During this time he
worked at the library in Munich which gave him a great knowledge of books. The British authorities were due to pay him a pension but it took a decade and a half for him to establish his identity and claim his money. Now he is rich and one of the leading experts, or so he claims, on German-language books in Turkey. I realized that, now that we were over the European watershed which lies between Nuremberg and Regensburg, I should be hearing a lot of tales embroidered with oriental splendour like this. But then perhaps it was the truth.

Captain Frolich, our pilot, was due to join us the next day from Linz where he lived, which was downstream about two hundred miles, in Austria. His friend Captain Ott had invited Ray and me to have dinner with him and his wife Christine at their house in a little village just outside Regensburg. We took a taxi and found them in the garden of a house that he and Christine had built with their own hands. The meal was very memorable because their next-door neighbours were Catalans and had come over to cook the most magnificent paella I have ever tasted. This kindness, and many others that we had found in Regensburg, convinced me that it is a very special city, one that has long had a spirit of independence which I hope it never loses.

At seven thirty the next day, Captain Frolich arrived with his Burberry neatly folded over his arm. He was a huge, neat man who spoke no English at all except for one mixed-language phrase that served for many occasions which was, ‘100 per cent
Absolut Catastroph'
which covered anything from my bad mooring techniques to Ray not stirring his goulash properly, but it was always said with great good humour and we soon grew very fond of him. He was a superb boat-handler and swung the
Leo
neatly in the current as we headed downstream out of Regensburg and down the Danube, passing right under the portals of Valhalla.

Our first stop was at a town called Straubing which lay at kilometre 2222 from the mouth of this enormous river. The
kilometres on the Danube are marked with large white boards displaying the number of the kilometre. Every hundred metres is a smaller board, with the half kilometre marked by a plus sign. This way of marking is extremely easy to read and a great deal easier than the official Danube charts. These are like no other charts that I have seen in that they have a complicated system of folded paper, so that when the river bends the chart is folded to bend also, representing the course of the river. When I pulled out my copy to show the Captain he laughed and indicated that the only time that professional Danube men ever used those was when there had been an accident, to establish their alibi.

One of the great problems we were to face on the river was a lack of suitable places to moor. The sides are rocky and the current swift, and the alternatives are either anchoring – which is fine if the river is wide enough – or finding a pontoon which won't have one of the frequent passenger boats arriving while you are tied up. Straubing had such a pontoon and we made our touch. At the end of the gangway was a small municipal garden which had been turned into a permanent exhibition for the local sculptors who, to my eye at least, were a talentless lot, as were a group of artists we had met in Regensburg who seemed to do their best business by shocking their would-be clients with lurid pornographic paintings and then selling them something far more modest to assuage the guilt they had been made to feel for not having the guts to hang a depiction of a six-foot phallus in their drawing room.

The Captain then revealed one of his great talents. He had brought a parcel of food with him and during the day he had been preparing a goulash for his first night aboard. Very much on our best behaviour, Ray and I laid the table and sat down while this vast man doled out, with incredibly neat movements, beautifully cooked rice which he had cooked with lemon – plus his delicious red goulash. He had, he said, made enough to last us a couple of days and when he saw how successful he had been promised to make us
‘Matrosen Fleisch'
next, which he said meant ‘sailor's meat' and was a mixture of beef and anchovies: Ray looked a little doubtful but I liked the sound of it.

Our next stop was to visit my daughter's former German mistress who had come to teach in a boys' school in Metten. She was a brisk German girl who had tried very hard to get to understand the British by taking enormous walks round London and the suburbs. Her view of life in London was very refreshing and I had always enjoyed her swift prattle and slight accent. The school she worked in was a fine old school run by monks, who had been recently forced to take in girls. She proudly showed us the library built by the Aram brothers, a fine pair of architects in the eighteenth century. The library had a very interesting cataloguing system which consisted of paintings on the ceiling of the type of books that you were likely to find in the section underneath. For example, if you wanted to find a book on astronomy, you'd look for the picture of the moon and stars. She came to see us off at the landing stage and waved a red silk handkerchief as we slipped away down the river – for some reason I felt homesick at that moment.

An hour later, we had arrived in Passau and tied up in the middle of the old town where three rivers, the Ilz, the Danube and the Inn meet. Up until the point on the Danube where the Inn meets it, the Inn produces much more water than the Danube and so, by sheer volume of water, the Danube should really be called the Inn. Passau is a fine old town, but on the day we arrived it was clear that something unusual was happening. There were a number of coaches which must have brought a large number of people into the town. I inquired what was going on and was told that the Neo-Nazi Party of Passau had been allowed to hire the town's official assembly rooms for a meeting. Ever curious, I walked up the hill to have a look and found that there was quite a large crowd, composed mostly of policemen, standing in front of
the hall. Inside, the Neo-Nazis were having their meeting, and standing about in the street were the opposition, mostly from the German Green Party who looked very much like the demonstrators who had been campaigning for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s.